So it feels like, suddenly, the cornerstones of the arguments against her are vaporizing before our eyes. This could go badly for El Goog unless they stop making official statements on the matter.
Saying nothing would have been better than giving a convenient post for all the former Google employees to come out of the woodwork and say “That’s not true! Google never did academic reviews; they solely checked whether business IP was being exposed.”
It’s ironic that people are painting her as unprofessional in that context; I’d be frustrated too, if that’s really the situation.
I think that there isn't internal academic review of the sort implied by Jeff at Google.
Timnit seems pretty clearly in the right here. As an AI researcher at a competitor, this impacts my desire to join Google in the future. I imagine these sort of PR disasters hurt their standing in the academic labor market.
Why do you think that?
What does this even mean? The power and resource disparity between Google and an individual researcher are so vast that this in no way can go bad for Google.
The idea that a few members on HN are disillusioned with Google is just another Tuesday for them. They literally do not care...no business of this size and magnitude do. The general public will never hear about this and if they do, they won't understand it, and if they do then they aren't the general public.
If it seems absurd that anyone would turn down a job at DeepMind, well... Let's just say, in my experience, prestigious institutions tend to come with a pile of downsides that everyone puts up with (because prestige) but no one really talks about (because no reason). If you care about shipping results quickly -- some researchers do (or at least I do) -- then the idea of joining a big company is already worrisome. Like you're a professional rower, happily rowing along and navigating wherever you want to go, then you're asked to join a galley rower: https://youtu.be/TyzQ-bVaqPU?t=294
There's no substitute for Google-scale work. (Working on TPUs would be a dream, IMO; where else could you possibly build those?) But if you join Google as a researcher, it sounds like your ideas have to (a) pass through their internal academic review, (b) pass through a journal's review, and then finally your idea can be published to the wider scientific community for comment. (b) was painful but possibly worthwhile, with arxiv serving as a bucket to catch everything else. Why roll your own internal review process? And why is Google trying to micromanage what researchers are allowed to publish?
I know we're probably missing a lot of the story. But on the other hand, Jeff has now given an official side of that story, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to set expectations.
Someone in the ML community posted the abstract and provided feedback, which seems to indicate that this followed the typical review cycles for conference papers.
